This week’s plans

Since cleaning and prepping my Savannah for flight last Sunday, I’ve been unable to do any more with either it or my X-Air due to the scorching weather we’ve been receiving. However, as I mentioned in a previous post, conditions are forecast to be much more favourable for flying on several days this coming week, notably on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, so I’ve decided to make some plans to get back into the air.

When you’ve had a long lay-off, as I have because of house buying and selling matters and Covid, what you need to do is get in a few take offs and landings to get your judgement and control coordination back into shape. Usually you’d do that with circuit bashing, but we can’t do that at Malbec because of the nature of the airfield.

I could nip down to Sarlat and do a few circuits there, which would be a good idea for my Savannah, which can get there pretty quickly and can easily fit in with any other general aviation traffic doing the same thing, because of its speed range. However, that’s not so feasible for my X-Air which would take longer to get there and back and might also have problems in the circuit if there are faster aircraft doing circuit training, for example.

However, I’ve decided to reject the Sarlat option and because my two aircraft have such different flight characteristics, to go for two different kinds of flights instead. Temperatures are forecast to be much more reasonable this week and the winds fairly light also, making this coming Wednesday, Thursday and Friday look as though they will be almost ideal flying days.

First my Savannah, which given today’s forecast, I’ve decided to fly on Wednesday. I’ll be going with the Savannah first because with it’s higher airspeed I’ll be able to cover a greater distance in the two or three hours from mid-morning before the temperature starts to rise and the thermals with it. This will give me the opportunity to drop into several different airfields to practice my landings before returning to Malbec. Here’s a pic of the flight I have planned.

After taking off from Malbec I plan to fly straight to Sarlat, maybe for a touch-and-go followed by a full stop, thus giving me two practice landings with plenty of room for ‘misjudgements’. Then I intend to drop into a new airfield that I’ve never been to before, LF 2436 St Julien down at the south-western corner of the Bergerac zone. This is a privately owned ULM airfield that’s open for visitors and I’ll be phoning ahead for permission, although this isn’t specified on the airfield ‘fiche’. From there I’ll then be flying on to a landing at Sainte Foy la Grande, an airfield I’ve now visited alone and with Wim on several occasions, and thence back to Malbec.

The whole flight should take less than 90 minutes, meaning that I should be back at Malbec before any thermals start to activate and with three or maybe four landings under my belt, depending on if a do do a touch-and-go at Sarlat or not.

Now for the X-Air flight which I plan to do on Thursday. The winds are forecast to be even lighter then than on the day before, not that that will be important. The key factor is that whereas my Savannah flies at 140-150 kmh, my X-Air only does about 90 kmh, so with a similar time frame in mind, I needed to plan a shorter flight (in distance) but one that would offer a similar number of landings and take offs. Here’s what I came up with.

Usually my first two ports of call in the slower aircraft would have been Galinat and Condat, but sadly, as I found yesterday, the first option is not available, for now at least. So my first stop will be Condat with its long, upward sloping hard runway. From there I plan to head for another airfield that I’ve never visited before, namely LF2443 Peyrillac.

This is another privately owned airfield that I’ll need to obtain prior permission for, but hopefully it will be forthcoming when I make my phone call. It has a long, upward sloping runway much like Malbec’s being, ‘only-one-way-in’ and the opposite way out, but with a length of over 400 metres, it should be much less challenging.

Then I intend to fly back to Malbec flying close by to Sarlat and the small town of St Cyprien. I don’t intend to land at Sarlat, although I’d have liked to, because the X-Air’s radio is now non-approved. However, my experience when I left UK airspace with it was that it communicated perfectly with the old 25 kHz London Information frequency so there’s no reason why it shouldn’t with Sarlat on 118.15, so I may drop in there anyway, especially if the circuit isn’t busy.

So those are my plans and they leave Monday and Tuesday for me to pump tyres up (I’ve just acquired a super new foot pump that knocks my old one into a cocked hat) and do anything else necessary to prepare the X-Air. And this time around I must make sure that my ruddy Go-Pro cameras are fully charged and ready to go…